 | |
| Industry | Specialty retail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder | Josh Spencer |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Number of locations | 1 store |
Area served | Los Angeles metropolitan area |
| Products | New, used and rare books |
| Owner | Josh Spencer |
Number of employees | 50+ |
| Website | lastbookstorela |
The Last Bookstore is an independent bookstore located at 453 S Spring Street, Downtown Los Angeles. Conde Nast Traveler called it California’s largest new and used bookstore. [1]
The store was founded in 2005 by Josh Spencer, the first incarnation being inside a Downtown Los Angeles loft. While here, the store sold books and other items online, then, in December 2009, it opened a bookstore at 4th and Main Street. The bookstore moved to its current 22,000 sq. ft. location in the Spring Arts Tower at 5th and Spring Street on June 3, 2011. [2] [3] [4] [5] The current store, a former bank, contains two floors and also includes the bank's former vault.
Vox reported that the store creates visual merchandising through creative displays and book sculptures, which attracts Instagram users, "in the hope of trying to convert Instagram visitors into book purchasers." [5]
In 2021, the bookstore installed a plant wall to the famous book tunnel. The store also features a restaurant: Yuko Kitchen. [6]
Filmmaker Chad Howitt chronicled The Last Bookstore and its owner, Spencer, in a short documentary titled Welcome to the Last Bookstore, released in 2016. It tells the story of how Spencer was injured as a young man and lost the use of his legs, forcing him to re-examine his life. [7] Los Angeles Film Review called the effort an "ode to resilience." [8]
The bookstore appeared in the 2014 David Fincher movie Gone Girl , and also in the 2018 movie Under the Silver Lake , directed by David Robert Mitchell. [9] [10]
The bookstore featured in the 2021 Netflix series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel . [11]
Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA) is the central business district of Los Angeles. It is part of the Central Los Angeles region and covers a 5.84 sq mi (15.1 km2) area. As of 2020, it contains over 500,000 jobs and has a population of roughly 85,000 residents, with an estimated daytime population of over 200,000 people prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chinatown is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles, California, that became a commercial center for Chinese and other Asian businesses in Central Los Angeles in 1938. The area includes restaurants, shops, and art galleries, but also has a residential neighborhood with a low-income, aging population of about 7,800 residents.
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Black Angel is a 1980 British short fantasy film that was shown before the theatrical release of The Empire Strikes Back in certain locales. It was the directorial debut of Star Wars art director Roger Christian. The film negative was thought to be lost until it was rediscovered in December 2011. In June 2015, it was announced that Christian was working on a feature film adaptation of Black Angel which would be partly funded through crowd-funding site Indiegogo.
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Circus of Books, also known as Chi Chi LaRue's Circus, is a bookstore and gay pornography shop in West Hollywood, California. It was established in the 1960s as "Book Circus", and in the past also had branches in the Silver Lake and Sherman Oaks neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
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